June Plans

The start of a month means a monthly goals list (more of a to-do list).

I'm working (unusually) on two painting commissions at the moment and must make plans for these, one at least will be on public display so must be an indisputable massterpiece... that's the only criteria, but I must decide exactly what and how.

I'll write some Clown Poems too. I've had a poetry collecting in progress for many months. Oddly, I've not published any of my poems since the ones I wrote per-day in 2010 (as 365 Universes). My alst book, Deep Dark Light, included some, but they were rather strange, stream-of-consciousness things that defy normal poetry classification. I think my poetry has improved a lot in recently years (improvement is such a subjective term!), partly due to getting to know and meet with local poets, so I really should get a collection together. The 'Clown Poems' are simply themed around the circus. I've written 30 or so, but need to structure the book so that it's more than a mere collection of poems. The structure of the book itself needs to be poetic.

I also want to work on some new song vocals and re-record some for existing tunes. I love singing, it's a matter of gently squeezing each cell until some sound squirts out. Each cell must simply express the flow of the music, thus singing is like free-dancing.

Seven Years in One Post

At last at LAST! The four days of tweaks and blog changes are done, four of the most intense days I've had in a long time. I spent Sunday, Monday and Tuesday underpainting a new painting that espouses my ideas of 'symphonic painting', ideas which are probably scattered here and there even in this fragmented blog.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I gradually faded off from blogging at around 2012.

2012 was a great year for productivity, a bounce-back from about 18 months of lows and anxious difficulty. I painted the Richard Dadd painting and made the cabinet for it, completed 'The Many Beautiful Worlds' novel and published the poems I wrote in 2010, founding Pentangel Books.

I continued the trend of pushing as many boundaries as my resources would allow. The Eden Iris in 2014 was a logical step up from the Dadd Cabinet, circular, hand carved, and with much more complex engineering. I began to continue to learn many new skills, to supplement mere painting. Lindsey Piper's Art Up Close started a new art club in a Nantwich photography studio, that of Adam Capper and a small group of us, perhaps under 10, met there regularly.

I entered my first art fair, paying £1500 or so to exhibit in Chelsea Town Hall for the Parallax Art Fair, but this was a huge flop for all involved; two scorching days at the height of summer, and a major football match perhaps contributed to the lack of visitors (the art was, sadly, really good quality and many artists had travelled from across Europe to attend; in contrast to many other fairs I've visited). The plus side of the fair was that I met a few fabulous artists, and made contact with a short-lived gallery named Gabriel Fine Art, who I subsequently exhibited a few times with.

In 2014 the art club building succumbed to its decay and I took the initiative, running a weekday art club myself in a church hall, although it was always a struggle to find enough regular participants. I had my first London solo exhibition, The Phenomenology of Love, in March 2015, and in July my first art performance event, also in London at a Gabriel event where I played piano for the first time, with other artists Sabine Kussmaul projecting video, and Escargot reading stream-of-consciousness text in French. This event began a trend for live performances and a lit the touchpaper of a passion of piano playing.

I appeared on local radio station, RedShift, to promote an art event. Liz, the wonderful station manager asked if I would like to host an arts programme, and after some hesitation, I agreed and joined the RedShift team to produce and host ArtsLab from October 2015, closing the doors on the moribund art club soon after.

I continued to paint, write music and everything else, of course, but I took part in many more live events. In 2016 I began to attend monthly art performance events in a small bar, helping to organise these with Sabine. Sabine and I collaborated on a few performances and installations, and in September I premiered 6 of my piano pieces in the magnificent surroundings of Chester Cathedral, to her projected videos.

After a first year of seeking and listening to avant-garde (well, to me!) music, the radio programme ArtsLab became more experimental as I changed the format, inviting anyone to create material to premiere, all in an attempt to boost engagement and the number of listeners. This requirement for new content, and the exploration of new music changed my music. The albums The Anatomy Of Emotions and Cycles & Shadows, as played in Chester, were in a new direction to my music from before.

In 2017 I began to perform with Deborah Edgeley as 'Fall in Green', myself on piano and keyboards, with words by Deborah, creating a contemporary lieder form of music. In 2018 we performed about once a month, adding to the invaluable experiences of staging live performances. After two years on the presenting radio I left ArtsLab to start a YouTube video version of the show, ArtSwarm, for a mix of reasons: the workload of the voluntary radio show was all-consuming; I'd explored experimental audio thoroughly and wanted to move to a next logical step; and so few people could listen to the internet radio, we often had less than 10 listeners.

In 2018 I published my first non-fiction book, 21st Century Surrealism, and held a solo exhibition (my 15th) in Stockport, inviting poets from the Write Out Loud group to contribute poems. This collaboration has led to a second; an exhibition exploring ekphrasis, and my latest album, Music of Poetic Objects.

Well, this is another mammoth post, so well done for getting this far. I thought it would be useful to put this update here, because quite a lot of this information is missing on this blog, and I wanted it to all feel neat and complete in one space, at very least. God bless the organisers! I'm more convinced than ever that the purpose of life is to order and to organise. Thus, those who do so, we cleaners and filers, are the most living of beings.

Now it's time to catch up on the things I should have been doing this week. Enjoy your weekend.

The Blog is Reborn

Well, it is done. I've spent most of this week updating the 1200 or so posts on this blog.

I'm filled with a mix of joy, but much regret that I haven't paid more attention to it in the past few years. The first few years worth of posts, from around 2008 to 2011 give a good diary-style account of my art activities in a nice format. After that, Facebook, and other similar distractions, intervened and came to replace these posts, but in recent times, Facebook has become a strange and unpleasant environment.

There are a few reasons why, I think. First, the site has become complicated to look at and to use. The pages are flashing, blinging, instant attention-grabbing displays. This is something that, on the internet, has grown notably more of a problem in the past few years. Even the BBC news website annoyingly includes links to other pages in the middle of stories. People might complain about the reduction of attention spans, but then exploit this by trying to distract people more and more. It's like a disease: distractomania, where people dart from one thing to another, like a fear of focusing on one thing, a fear of missing something better, perhaps.

This was always a bit of a problem on everything internet related, but in the past two or so years, Facebook has been so focused on advertising that every other post is an advert; items designed to distract. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with advertising, but distraction makes people unhappy because happiness is giving your care, attention and focus on one thing exclusively. Distraction, therefore, causes unhappiness, and naturally causes anxiety because anxiety is a chemical breakdown of extant neural pathways in anticipation of forming new ones; a mushing of learning. It makes us ready for new action, but is, as a result, the opposite of relaxation, which is, neurologically, riding the rails, so to speak.

Secondly, the 'social' aspect of Facebook itself is rather odd, and changes as the number of 'friends' grow. We are expected to connect with our friends (and people we might encounter once, and strangers who might become friends). These begin as a limited group of people we know well, then expand into a larger group of slight connections, and into total strangers. The vastness of the group makes it feel less 'friendly', but at the same time, it is too small to broadcast general information to the world, thus, Facebook recognises that many people want to make posts public, worldwide and eternal (Twitter-like formats have a better system for this, everything is visible to everyone and we can, in turn, choose who to listen to).

On Facebook, this is all to confusing. Having more Friends is better, but too many is unwieldy, yet we can hardly cull a few off; that would feel rude, but also would reduce our feelings of impact in the world. It's like a lose-lose situation.

There's no intimacy and few actual feelings of friendship on Facebook because the place is like a virtual expo, something like the E3 show, a bustling hall full of several hundred people and sales-stalls. The people, in this vast swirling exhibition or sales fair, are chosen by Facebook's algorithm, so although we're not seen by everyone in the hall, we are seen at sort of random. Any conversations with someone in a virtual corner and not remotely private. We all have megaphones in this hall.

We also discover that we all have sales stalls too, and this makes everything worse, for we distract each other as much as we are distracted.

The very instant nature of social media makes posts short and snappy, and also ephemeral. Long posts like this would be difficult to type and edit, and so many sites are so geared towards tiny phone screens, that large posts, even news stories by major news organisations are discouraged.

One big positive that Blogger has over Facebook is that the content is relatively simple, that we can download our stuff, and delete it if we want. With Facebook, we have the impression that they own everything, won't delete our content even if we ask, and that we can't control what they do with it. The Donald Trump election and the Brexit vote were key events in the history of Facebook, they made the social media experience horrible en masse; it was like entering a battlefield of angry catchphrases.

To the future. For me, I've posted some updates of my activities here and there, but the blog became a resting point for the ArtsLab listings, the weekly list of the music and guests on my two-years of local radio broadcasting. I also shared a few philosophical and pseudo-scientific ideas that I also included on my website; but a general idea of what I was doing, feeling and thinking as an artist has often been lost, or scattered across Facebook and Twitter (which is as good as lost).

I toyed with the idea of locating some of these posts and posting some sort of update here - my obsessive neatness and desire for completion would be the end of me! But I've settled for tidying up the HTML of every post here and adding new, more easily located, tags/labels about painting, music, poetry etc. I've removed many links, as these tended to go out of date scarily quickly, and dead links can lead to exploitation. You might have to search for the ends of those links in old posts, but that at least, today, is easy.

Gosh, this is a long post, well done for getting this far! I'm assuming that you are now some researcher of art from the distant future, and so, hello from the murky past of 2019.

I haven't really written posts since before ArtsLab, so I'll work on a post that tries to summarise my more recent art activities that are absent from this blog. This is nearly impossible, as my posts can be as long as this for one day, but I'll try at least because I wouldn't want my life to miss out a huge chunk, like van Gogh's did when he paused writing his letters to Theo.

Blog Life

Well, an interesting day today, going through some past blog posts. I used to blog regularly, but since perhaps the ArtsLab programme, I stopped, perhaps preferring to write more on Facebook, or on offline channels. I always kept and keep regular work diaries for every creative project, recording my thoughts and technical notes, and perhaps those have gained priority in recent years.

I do notice that I used to blog a lot more, prior to 2011. I also notice, annoyingly, that many of my posts, over 1000 or so, have problems loading due to https issues around blogger. These need manually updating, no small feat. I could potentially do this in a day or two and am working to do this; mainly updating each post, checking links and various things.

It feels good to read back some of those old posts and perhaps I'll get back into the habit of doing this more. Social media, that fad, was social and blog-like once, but now it's more advertising based, and not very social. The Facebook method of adding 'Friends' isn't as useful at the Twitter (or Instagram, or Blogger) method of posting anything, viewing anything and allowing the same. the benefit here is that it is NOT social; it can be interesting, like Wikipedia can, and perhaps that is one key benefit.

Updates continue. I'll aim for 400 posts per day.

The Shape of Cause to Effect

Everything that happens now, the current state of the universe, is a direct result of the state of the universe one tick ago. The state of the universe one tick ago is the result of its state one tick before that, and so on.

Could this be true for all time?

The first, amazing conclusion when considering this is that, at some point, somewhere at the instant start of time, this could not be true. That there had to be a start without a precursor and that the pattern of all things would be made by the initial conditions of the universe, and that time would somehow emerge or be kick-started into existence. This seems to be the predominant idea in current science.

Let's think about this. Assuming that an infinite amount of energy, or stuff, shines out in a fixed space, like a sphere or hypersphere. This smooth white ball conveys nothing and could not change. Some sort of pushing forwards, a kick, is needed. It is essential that there is a deformation of sorts to create a particular type of seed of information, something that will grow in a fashion that will not lead to perfect stability, and not puff away to nothing or pure randomness either.

What if the sphere was not a sphere but a different shape, that had different sizes of dimension, a rugby ball perhaps, or a more complex shape, like an origami dragon or something? A homogeneous flow of information covering this shape must stretch in unusual ways such that it could never explore it all. It would behave like a puzzle with no solution, one where the solution seemed ever closer, but always a little out of reach, somewhat like, well, the laws of physics themselves. No matter how much we know, no matter how close we feel we are to knowing everything, a final truth seems just a little out of reach. This could be the very nature of the universe itself, and if so, there can never be a solution to understanding the universe beyond knowing that it was unknowable.

Perhaps a point of time with no precursor is impossible. There is a second alternative to the cause-to-effect model of the universe; that all existence follows this pattern for all time, forever. This would mean that time would be infinitely large; or at least as large as space, the finite distance between its two most distant objects. Even here, an initial emergence or explosion of information would be needed at some point, to define the shape of everything that followed, wouldn't it?

There's something magical about fractals, pretty shapes like The Mandelbrot Set. These seem to contain the correct mix of order and chaos to create life-like complex arrangements of patterns that include finite patterned areas, like our galaxies and planets, and areas of infinity, like the black holes that we see. The areas typically shaded black in a Mandelbrot Set represent infinity, where the calculation could continue forever without conclusion. It is interesting that supermassive black holes appear to have existed since the start of the universe and that their formation is still unexplained. These objects, filled with infinities, seem to match the properties of the black areas of a Mandelbrot Set, as though we were living inside a giant multi-dimensional fractal.

One thing that fractals have is symmetry, even The Mandelbrot Set has perfect vertical symmetry, and other types of fractal tend to have other perfect symmetries. The universe we see does not appear to have this symmetry; if this were the case then there would necessarily be one of me typing this now, somewhere, and one of you reading it. Perhaps this is the case, in some domain beyond the visible, detectable horizon.

Fractals use complex numbers, which due to their mathematical utility must be a fundamental part of the universe itself. It is the crunching of these that determine the look of the fractals. Any theory that unifies physical laws must necessarily unify mathematics.

If all of existence follows the cause to effect model forever, then perhaps there could be an exact symmetry across the time dimension to create a fractal type pattern. What we think of as the start of the universe is acually the point of reflection, and everything before that point would move, as we would think, backwards.

An interesting thing about The Mandelbrot Set is that, at the point of reflection, its line of virtual mirror is filled with infinities. Perhaps these reflect its state of shapes to come. Perhaps this area of mock compression could appear like an enfolded shape, crunched and compressed, ready to give birth to it large scale forms.

Playing by Empathy: Incorporation of Musical Instruments into the Body Schema

For a tennis player, the racket becomes part of his or her body, and movements of it rapidly become as unconscious as to move an arm. Some research shows that the tools which we use are mapped inside our brains as though these were part of us, and this seems logical. Once we wear clothes, for example, these quickly become ignored by us and considered to be part of us, a new skin.

I realised that, when playing the piano, this also occurs; that I feel that the instrument is part of me and that I merely speak my feelings and thoughts with its voice, in the same way that I use my real voice and expressions, and in the same way that I'm using these words now. This discovery led to me to a new method of learning to play instruments and a new composition method too.

The essence of this method is empathy with the instrument. It's something that most musicians have anyway, and many great musicians talk of a love of a particular instrument, or piano stool, or outfit. These all become components of the artist's body. Once this is understood, learning to play an instrument is not a matter of technical exercises, but a physical therapy, like a patient with paralysis learning to move a damaged limb, or a child learning to walk.

What one calls the ability to play is not the mastery of technique, but an understanding of the full gamut of the instrument's capabilities, and the nerve control to express that gamut. As a player, your goal is to make the instrument move all of its parts, sounding each possible note with each possible timbre.

So to learn using this method, one must embrace and love the instrument totally, feeling it as though it were an extension of your body. To play is not to use a tool, but to speak with a new voice that becomes part of your body. To play is as simple as to feel and to express your feelings, shout or whisper them with this new voice. The mastery of playing is not technical, but as physical as a growth of connection to this new limb.

All of this means that there is no such thing as being able to play or not being able to play an instrument, but that everything is a gradient of ability. It also implies that most of the learning will take place between the instrument and player alone, and that a third presence, a teacher, might be disruptive. The theory here is that empathy works most powerfully between two people, and the emotions of a third presence will disrupt on some level. If so, then solo pupil and solo teacher, followed by solo pupil and solo instrument might be more effective as a teaching method that having the instrument present with pupil and teacher. As evidence of this, it seems to be a common trait that expert instrumentalists spend the majority of their training alone with the instrument, seeing their teacher for shorter periods.

Like speaking or writing, there is art in this expression, but this opens up a new way to compose: an instantaneous transliteration of feelings by simply playing. This is what is called improvising, but that word often has an element of sketch or light-weight quality to it. Players who improvise or 'jam' are not thought of as composing, except perhaps by a traditional surrealist. Yet, this 'Body Schema' theory of music performance suddenly makes live playing as important, certainly more authentic, as any detailed study or practised composition.

Of course, like any speech that is spontaneously spoken, it doesn't mean that every creation is a great work, but a great work perhaps works on many levels. Art is about emotional communication; it's a dialogue, and each performance is unique because each circumstance is unique. By using the instrument as a body extension, this gives the artist the power to change the message for each circumstance, so perhaps a live performance can be great in a way that a recording cannot. A composer that creates in this way when there is no audience present, is broadcasting feelings to an invisible audience.

I will end with a romantic notion, that perhaps a deaf or dumb performer would seek to speak more powerfully, and so perhaps a musician with no voice except for his or her instrument, is destined to speak the most beautiful words.

Life as an Information Storage System

How do you define what is alive and what is not alive? Why is a planet full of life is different from a planet without life? I think that the answers are about order and chaos, and life sides with order.

Life is fundamentally a system of information organisation and storage. A living person is a closed system of information storage and utilisation, used to bring order to a disordered system. To die is to terminally lose information cohesion, liberating this to the next shell domain of information, for example, civilisation, which itself is more ordered than nature, which we could define as a life bearing but human-free domain, which is more ordered than lifeless nature, such as a planet without life.

The key definition of life is an information storage and processing entity with the ability to increase the order of a disordered system.

This definition of life and death has several implications.

On the surface, it removes the contemporary definitions of the need to metabolise or replicate, but on further analysis, this can still apply: for example a filing cabinet can store information but does not order its surroundings, and so could not be considered alive. Reproduction could be seen as an extension of the utility to order the universe, and is thus compatible with this definition. Taking in food helps maintain the informational integrity of the body vs. not taking food.

Plants and bacteria store and pass on information, and can order their environment, but humans can order a system more effectively.

Machines which can self-order the world should be considered alive. At time of writing, machines are usually tools for humans, but computers can self-order small pockets of information: for example ordering computer files. Small robots could order cubes upon a table, or mow a lawn. A ruler, as a converse example, cannot; despite aiding humans to order things, making a ruler a tool rather than alive.

We have varying control over what we are capable of ordering, and this defines how alive we are. Humans can almost control all things, as a species, and almost all humans have some influence over the rest of the species. It is perhaps this that makes humans the paragon of living things.

Blue Carpet (or The Hotel Carpet Blues)

I'm working in music at the moment, assembling a new album of experimental works, the best of the things I've created for my old radio show, ArtsLab, and some things I've made for ArtSwarm. I'm remaking (or at least touching up) almost all of the tracks. There are a few that won't make it onto the album because I don't think they are good enough, or were simply one-off recordings that were put together without keeping any of the source material. I'm putting some on SoundCloud, and here is one called "Blue Carpet", or the Hotel Carpet Blues. It was a song about carpets. The comedy is unpinned by reality and metaphor. This is the magic of creativity.

Blue Carpet (or The Hotel Carpet Blues)

I'm threadbare, pulled thin
trodden like the mud on my skin
Walked on and ignored
and covered in dust
my yellowing fibres resembling rust

I'm flaky, snaky, falling apart
the weave on my soul chokes the wool in my heart
I'm holding together as dust
My skin is a colourless crust

I'm a hotel carpet, in a cheap Parisian backstreet
I'm choking on the nothing and the cigarette friends that I meet
well, they meet me,
they fall on my face and get crushed in
its the closest to love I get these days

I'm a hotel carpet, yellowy beigey putrid
Yes why not drag your rotten luggage over me

Walked on and ignored
covered in rust
my yellowing fibres resembling dust

Rug!
Rug!
Rug!